By Brendan Conway

Byron Wien, vice chairman of Blackstone Advisory Partners (BX), has a slew of bearish predictions amid the stock market’s New Year ebullience.

After several years of profit growth, Wien predicts most notably that tougher times are about to get underway for corporate profits. A slow-growing global economy sends the collected earnings of Standard & Poor’s 500 (SPY) member companies below $100, which in turns causes investors to dump U.S. stocks, pushing the S&P 500 below 1,300. From today’s prices, that’s a fall of more than 10%.

Financial stocks, in particular, have a tough time, reversing the gains of 2012. Competition for new banking business, weak trading volumes on Wall Street, regulation and lawsuits take their toll. For those of you working on the Street, sorry, bub: “Layoffs continue and compensation erodes further.” Read here for Wien’s “Ten Surprises for 2013″ list.

It’s outside his top ten, but Wien also sees the CBOE Market Volatility Index surging 33% from late 2012 levels to 30 — though hitting 30 would actually be a doubling from today’s levels. Read our previous coveragefor why this still may not be enough to make the leveraged ProShares Ultra VIX Short-Term Futures ETF (UVXY) or the Barclays iPath S&P 500 Short-term VIX Futures ETN (VXX) good bets.

Climate change afflicts the agricultural markets, sending the price of corn to $8 a bushel, wheat to $9 and cattle to $1.50 a pound. Bad news for everybody, but good news for holders of ETFs like Teucrium Corn Fund (CORN) or PowerShares DB Agriculture Fund (DBA).

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There are 3 comments

JANUARY 2, 2013 3:02 P.M.

Vandemar wrote:

Looked up his predictions last year, he was right on about 3.5 out of 10, unless your playimg baseball, pretty bad. Makes a great story, maybe he should write a Horoscope column then he will always be right!

JANUARY 2, 2013 5:11 P.M.

petten wrote:

... “the Democrats sponsor a vigorous program to make the United States independent of Middle East oil imports before 2020.” ...

This'll happen when the sun comes up in the west and goes down in the east.

JANUARY 2, 2013 5:27 P.M.

Joe Monroe wrote:

S&P down just 10%? is that a JOKE, its' gone up 5% in the last two days on the fiscal cliff JOKE! Market has not corrected in over 4 yrs and 10% is all you can come up with?

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As exchange-traded funds and other investing vehicles have ballooned in number, the task of figuring out what works well and what doesn’t has only gotten harder. Barrons.com’s Focus on Funds looks under the hood of ETFs, mutual funds and hedge funds for overlooked values, actionable ideas and the latest pitfalls for fund investors.

Chris Dieterich has covered the U.S. stock market for The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. He is a graduate of Regis University and the Missouri School of Journalism.